Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini | Page 9

been written on "Francesca da Rimini," and every poet has essayed at one time or another to surpass Dante's incomparable lines. Music scores have glorified this passionate love story, while marble and canvas have caught the external expression of it. In its portrayal, actual history has taken on legendary character, and so "Francesca da Rimini" now ranks as a theme with the history of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristan and Isolde. It has become the inspiration for Maeterlinck in "Pell��as and M��lisande," who has viewed the Italian passion through a mirage of mysticism.
Into "The Divine Comedy," the account of Francesca and Paolo is dropped, keen, sensitive and delicate, as though the poet, a friend of those concerned, wished to cover the hard fact of illicit love in an ecstacy of human feeling. Dante, the supreme master of his age, the incomparable lover of Beatrice, differentiated this tragedy from countless incidents of like character which marked his age. Had the story been preserved only in the form recorded by Boccaccio, it would have been lost in its minor details of history; whereas Dante has glorified it.
By the very fact that Dante places the two lovers in the circle of the Lustful, it is clear that he realized the enormity of their sin. The theory that his friendship with Guido Novella, the nephew of Francesca, made Dante refrain from entering fully into the incident, will not hold, when it is remembered that the cantos of the Inferno were written in 1300, seventeen years before the poet reached Ravenna, and accepted the hospitality of the Polenta house. Dante's infinite compassion is, therefore, the cause for the compressed poetry of this famous passage.
Dante's Francesca lines have been infinitely translated. Longfellow is conscientious; Byron chafes to be freed of the original Italian, and his lines are irksome; Rossetti sees and feels, but he is laboured. Dante, infinitely translated, remains supreme.
The poems on this ideal love legend are of infinite variety. Tassoni describes Paolo, the warrior, consumed with ravishing love, "shrunk with misery;" he fails to reach the youthful passion, and is as medi?vally chivalric as is Chaucer in "The Knightes Tale" of Palamon and Arcite. Leigh Hunt resorts to stilted narrative and description.
Byron once thought to write a drama on this subject; had he done so, Silvio Pellico might have had a formidable rival. More or less, all the playwrights have gone to Italian history, and the more exact they became, the more gross the situation. F. Marion Crawford fell on this rock of accuracy, when he wrote his Francesca play for Mme. Sarah Bernhardt.
Silvio Pellico, who wrote the first drama on "Francesca da Rimini" known to modern playgoers, lived his early life in an intensely religious atmosphere, and suffered imprisonment later because of his patriotic tendencies; it is not surprising, therefore, to find in his play--first a national appeal that was to win it applause from all Italy, and then, more important still, a purity of tone that struggled most nobly against an inevitable, passionate end. Paolo is the one who, after some scruples, succumbs; Francesca is infinitely conscious that she is a wife; Giovanni is suspicious. It would seem that Pellico's play is the first that realized the theatrical possibilities of the story; research has brought to light no play manuscript previous to his.
In the handling of his details, Pellico's incongruities and artificialities are many. Paolo returns from knightly deeds in Asia, to find his father dead--the Malatesta Verucchio who died in 1312, twenty-seven years after Giovanni committed the murder; therefore Pellico gives to the deformed brother the power that history does not wholly accord. The dramatist would avoid the indelicacy he finds in the reading incident, recounting it only in a situation during which Francesca holds aloof in a wild effort to stifle her love. Throughout the play, there is this ruthless twisting, in a desire to conceal wrong and unpardonable sin.
Turning to Uhland's fragmentary ideas, which even he himself was doubtful whether he could handle, an atmosphere confronts us as medi?vally German as the "Der arme Heinrich" of Hartmann von Aue, which was the inspirational source for Longfellow's "The Golden Legend." Uhland shows heaviness in conception, and a conventionality, thoroughly at variance with the tragedy's original passion. Romantic as he is, he has robbed the story of its warm southern nature, and has thrown his Dante aside to deal with false situation. He seems willing to let fact and spirit go. Paolo is a knight who tilts and worships a glove. Uhland thinks, and he is not alone in his belief, that Francesca had been promised to Paolo before Giovanni was wedded to her; yet if _Paolo's_ marriage with Orabile, in 1269, is to be recognized as correct, historically, logical deductions from dates would discountenance the statement. Neither have I found